Epi-Classic Cultural Dynamics in the Mezquital Valley

Evidence of Interregional Interaction through the Epi-Classic

Forty years ago, during the explorations carried out in Xochicalco under his direction, the archaeologist César Sáenz found a number of offerings that predated the second building sequence for the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent.

The peculiarity in this finding was the presence of a number of greenstone carved figures which, to Sáenz’s surprise, seemed to share identical traits (Figure 1 and Figure 2). Distributed in three of the four main contexts recorded in said building during the 1962-63 field season, the pieces were accompanied by other peculiar objects, such as a tecali vessel with a polychrome fresco decoration, a carved snail and shell strings, in Offering 1, and tubular and quadrangular greenstone beads, in addition to a pair of earflares of the same material, in Burial 2.

In his report on these findings, Sáenz noted that one of the characters represented in greenstone greatly resembled the plaque he had recovered while exploring Palenque’s Temple XVIII, in 1954 (Sáenz, 1956:8-9, Hirth, 2000:203) (Figure 3), as also a number of objects that are a part of the Woods Bliss Collection, illustrated by Samuel Lothrop in his work Pre-Columbian Art (1959, in Sáenz, 1963a:21-22).

Regarding these figures, Lothrop suggested a possible connection with the Zapotecan culture, and Sáenz in turn mentioned that the type of headdress decoration used by most individuals is present in jades from the Guatemala and El Salvador Plateaus, as well as in the Olmec region (ibid.:22). All of the above made him state that "[…] we must find their association with the Zapotec region and perhaps also with cultures more to the south" (idem).

With these findings, plus those that had taken place months before in Building "C", where also greenstone pendants, snails, shell beads and plates of this style were jointly found, César Sáenz concluded: "The nine jade plates or pendants we have found, and which came from Structure C and from the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpents, are not indicative of the existence and significance of this deity in Xochicalco, since all of them represent, with slight variations, one and the same individual" (Sáenz, 1963b:7).

Since the 1930’s, Alfonso Caso headed a comprehensive exploration program in Oaxaca. With the assistance of several other researchers, sites from the Mixteca and the Central Valleys were surveyed and excavated, and in this latter region, Monte Albán in particular (Bernal, 1965:793). John Paddock, who participated in these efforts, presented in his Ancient Oaxaca. Discoveries in Mexican Archaeology and History (1966), some of the interpretations obtained following almost thirty years of works in the area.

Paddock’s publication is specially mentioned, as it illustrates a large variety of pieces that are variants of the style that Sáenz described; today, most of these pieces belong to the collections of the National Museum of Anthropology and History (Figure 4).

Paddock reproduced the objects but did not provide a thorough description, nor has he mentioned any context of provenience though he has attributed them to the Monte Albán IIIb, IIIb-IV and IV phases (1966:152, figs.159-165). A similar temporal assignment and scarce provenience information are seen in Alfonso Caso’s work on Oaxacan stone carvings, published one year earlier. In this work, Caso acknowledges the similarities with contemporary Maya pieces (1965a:906-907), a fact that can be easily observed in Robert Rands’ work about lowland Maya jades included in the same volume (1965:569-573).

No one can deny the reality of the connections between Xochicalco, the Central Oaxacan Valleys and the Maya Area, but elements to think about how close they were and what characteristics they had socially adopted are not abundant, besides the commercial value of the objects in common. It is precisely in this sense that the objects and contexts that have motivated this research may be useful.

Surprisingly, their tracing has led us beyond these regions, to sites and contexts apparently so geographically apart and so culturally alien, that it would be worthwhile to reevaluate the role they played within the dynamic Mesoamerican mosaic.

César Sáenz was one of the first scholars to describe in detail the context in which these objects were found. The significance of his publications resides in having recognized the similarities of the traits represented, in a way that they may be considered not only as pertaining to a same style, but also associated to a specific deity, the attributes of which are enhanced by the objects with which they usually shared an archaeological context.

Several years before the findings in Xochicalco took place, the presence of these pieces had been documented in sites such as Tula, Monte Albán, Palenque, Veracruz, Chichén Itzá, and several others in Central America (see Ringle et al., 1998; McVicker and Palka, 2001); also Ramón Mena, as Head of the Archaeology Department, has published a catalog with the jade objects stored in the deposits of the former National Museum of Archaeology, History and Ethnography, where several examples have been illustrated (1990 [1927]: illus. 2, 5, 13). We now know that a number of samples exist elsewhere in Hidalgo, Querétaro, the State of México, Guerrero and the Mixteca, for instance, and that they are abundant in sites from the southern Maya lowlands.

Previous Page  |  Table of Contents  |  Next Page

Return to top of page